Hero who escaped death camps to assassinate Hitler says "I didn't think of the danger"

Henry Wermuth stuck to the shadows as he slipped past the Nazi guards and crept from the labour camp into the forest. No one would notice he was missing for hours and by that time he could be miles away. He was free.

Yet escape was the last thing on his mind. Instead he planned to kill Adolf Hitler.

It was the autumn of 1942 and the German dictator was on his way to the Eastern Front to boost the morale of war-weary troops fighting the Russians in Stalingrad.

The train journey would take him right past the Jewish camp at Klaj in Poland where Henry, 19, and his father Bernhard were prisoners.

His mother Ida and sister Hannah, 13, had been sent to another camp and the teenager was so scared for their safety he decided to take an incredible gamble.

Henry Wermuth tried to Kill Hitler in the Second World War he was later awarded a medal in 1995 in Germany for his efforts

Security increased whenever a VIP was near and that day there so many guards Henry knew it could only be for one man: Hitler.

So that night he slipped past the patrols and made his way to the railway, where he laid logs, rocks and blocks of wood across the tracks to build a booby trap that would derail the train and, he hoped, kill the evil Nazi leader.

“I didn’t think of the danger,” says Henry. “I hoped if I killed Hitler the war would end and my mother and sister would be free.

“The next morning I woke up in a sweat. I went to the station but couldn’t get nearer than about 80 yards. There was a train with three wagons and in the middle carriage I saw a man. Without his hat on I recognised his hairstyle and his funny moustache immediately.

“I watched mesmerised, waiting for the crash that would set us all free. But it never came. I can only assume my contraption was cleared away by a farmer or patrol.”

Henry crept back to to the camp and was scolded by his father for risking their lives with his “stupid” plan. It was another 53 years before his courage was formally recognised.

In 1995 he was invited to his home town of Frankfurt and awarded the gold Johanna Kirchner Medal for his heroic bid.

Now 91, Henry was the only one of his family to survive the war. He lost the use of his left arm after a stroke 10 years ago but it still bears a faded tattoo with his ­prisoner number from Auschwitz, B3407.

These days Henry has an electric wheelchair to move around his home in Stanmore, Middle­sex. He clutches his medal proudly as he recounts his story – and like all Holocaust survivors, he has horrifying tales to tell.

Henry was not quite 10 when the Nazis came to power. He recalls: “Troops in khaki uniforms called the SA marched in the streets singing blood-curdling songs: ‘If Jewish blood splashes from the knife, it tastes twice as good’.

“First they dismissed all the Jews in the civil service and hospitals, then they boycotted Jewish shops and we had to wear armbands with the Star of David.”

When Poland announced it was closing its borders in 1938, his parents were among 14,000 Polish Jews in Germany who were sent East. At the border Henry’s father turned and asked him if they should cross or try to make their way back home. “I was an adventurous young man,” says Henry, shaking his head. “So I said three words I will never forget: ‘Let’s go on’.

“I have often wondered if those words condemned my parents and sister to death. But if we had gone back it might have been the same, or worse, and I might have died too.”

The family lived with Polish relatives until he and his father were sent to their first forced-labour camp in 1942. Then Henry came back to find his sister and mother had been sent East on a train. They left two hastily scribbling postcards, one each for him and his father.

Henry accepts now that they probably died as soon as they arrived at a camp. But at the time he clung to the hope that they were alive.

“As long as I had the postcard it felt like they were alive but when I lost it in Auschwitz I knew they were gone,” he says. He and his father were sent to eight different camps. In Plaszow he encountered SS fiend Amon Goeth, portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in the film Schindler’s List.

Goeth boasted of being the greatest mass murderer of all time having killed 84,000 men with his own hands. He watched Jews work through the telescopic sight of his rifle and shot dead any who paused for breath. One day as Henry tried to warn two new arrivals not to stop and chat, one of Goeth’s bullets narrowly missed his neck and tore the collar of his jacket. The shock knocked him to the floor, where he lay trapped beneath the bodies of the other men.

Adolf Hitler

“I lay face down and heard steps coming closer,” says Henry. “I thought I was finished. But then I thought of a stupid game we played at school, seeing who could hold his breath longest. I won then and I thought I must win again. The steps came close enough to look, then went away and I could breathe again.”

His father survived until a guard accused him of stealing bread and hit him on the head with a huge club. He died from his injuries just eight days before the Allies liberated the ­Mathausen camp in May 1945.

Henry says: “When I heard he was dead a single tear ran down my cheek and dried up. When we were liberated the camp and I knew the war was over I cried a stream of tears.

“I wouldn’t believe I had so much water in me. Only then I said to myself, ‘You are alive but you are alone’. I went out of barracks and saw a skeleton in the window of the next block. I saw it was me. I smiled at the skeleton, it smiled back and I said, ‘This skeleton is going to live.”

Henry, a retired property developer has since survived tuberculosis, skin cancer, a stroke and a quadruple bypass.

Henry tried to Kill Hitler in the Second World War he was later awarded a medal in 1995 in Germany for his efforts (Photo: Daily MIrror / Ian Vogler)

He met his wife Elisabeth when he returned to Frankfurt after the war and they have two children and two grandchildren.

He is determined his story should live on so has written his autobiography, Breath Deeply My Son. The title is his father’s advice in case they were sent to the Auschwitz gas chambers. Henry, who has also written four novels, now tours schools to tell children his story.

“I owe it to my parents to keep their memory alive,” he reflects. “For me the pain never heals. I don’t want people to forgot this chapter of history and the lessons it teaches us. It must never happen again.”

For a copy of Henry’s autobiography Breathe Deeply My Son or any of his fiction titles email ahwermuth@aol.com with the word Books in the subject line.